FASA: a Flexible and Automatic Speech Aligner for Extracting High-quality Aligned Children Speech Data

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Dancheng, Xiong, Jinjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929400305418240
author Liu, Dancheng
Xiong, Jinjun
author_facet Liu, Dancheng
Xiong, Jinjun
contents Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for adults' speeches has made significant progress by employing deep neural network (DNN) models recently, but improvement in children's speech is still unsatisfactory due to children's speech's distinct characteristics. DNN models pre-trained on adult data often struggle in generalizing children's speeches with fine tuning because of the lack of high-quality aligned children's speeches. When generating datasets, human annotations are not scalable, and existing forced-alignment tools are not usable as they make impractical assumptions about the quality of the input transcriptions. To address these challenges, we propose a new forced-alignment tool, FASA, as a flexible and automatic speech aligner to extract high-quality aligned children's speech data from many of the existing noisy children's speech data. We demonstrate its usage on the CHILDES dataset and show that FASA can improve data quality by 13.6$\times$ over human annotations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_17926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FASA: a Flexible and Automatic Speech Aligner for Extracting High-quality Aligned Children Speech Data
Liu, Dancheng
Xiong, Jinjun
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for adults' speeches has made significant progress by employing deep neural network (DNN) models recently, but improvement in children's speech is still unsatisfactory due to children's speech's distinct characteristics. DNN models pre-trained on adult data often struggle in generalizing children's speeches with fine tuning because of the lack of high-quality aligned children's speeches. When generating datasets, human annotations are not scalable, and existing forced-alignment tools are not usable as they make impractical assumptions about the quality of the input transcriptions. To address these challenges, we propose a new forced-alignment tool, FASA, as a flexible and automatic speech aligner to extract high-quality aligned children's speech data from many of the existing noisy children's speech data. We demonstrate its usage on the CHILDES dataset and show that FASA can improve data quality by 13.6$\times$ over human annotations.
title FASA: a Flexible and Automatic Speech Aligner for Extracting High-quality Aligned Children Speech Data
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17926